Technical trading sports&automation

Month: June 2016

I received some feedback this week on my blog, complaining about the lack of ‘tech’ in my ‘tech’ blog. It’s a fair comment, but in my eyes the markets lead the technology, not the other way around – so that’s what I tend to concentrate on.

In a former life I programmed touch screens for audio visual control systems and I see parallels with the sports trading bot world, in terms of the tools used to create these.

10 years ago I would be editing lines and lines of text code. It would be laborious, complex and training was limited which protected those programming in that field. Over time, it became more graphical, logical and accessible by the end user.

I played around with the new bet Angel update this week and it paints a great picture of how things have moved on. No longer any need to configure API access, create your interface or write the code.

Their signals introduction is fantastic and opens up so much flexibility. I set up a simple back to lay file in an hour that will operate with any SP and fire off the lay bets that I require. I copied the whole set, to fire again once first cycle is complete so in essence I am playing with free money earned.

The ironic this was with 30 rules present and set to increase, I was essentially looking at teams of code again!!

I won’t be able to sell my bet Angel code, so from a business sense it may not be great, but I don’t mind. It’s a fantastic development tool and will be a fresher way to come up with new ideas. It will certainly impact the IR markets as this style of trading becomes more popular.

I see traders love tech for tech’s sake but don’t think it should be the driving force in what you do. The tools are there to create complex rules with ease, to the point where the technology or platform used to create will become transparent over time.

An aim for me with this blog was to increase my interaction with like-minded traders. I wouldn’t say that has been a resounding success, but I do get the odd interesting (and sometimes far-fetched) line of enquiry. Like this weeks:

Mr X: I am new to trading and want to make £10k.

Me: How much do you want to stake?

Mr X:£10.

I ignored this email for a while, but it began to eat away at me over the course of last week. Often the starting point for those wishing to write bot’s is from a sporting angle, with which they hope to find an edge. Approaching from a purely financial angle was something i hadn’t done in a while.

I opened my spreadsheet and it actually surprised me how simple this could be done. It actually took £15 instead of £10 stake. It’s a 2 trade automation.

Back selection A: £15 @10.0

Lay selection A: £1355 @1.1

Back selection A: £1355 @10.0

Green @ 1.1 for £10801

Ok so, it 4 trades if you do it manually and you can probably find my calculations out a couple of quid (i altered my commision rate on the sheet and it went a bit funny), but the principle is there.

We went on to discuss the likelihood of this happening, i explained you needed this to hit approximately once every 2 years to break even. My conclusion that although possible, it’d be tricky for a novice to retain the temperament and the will to be able to carefully pick scenarios where this might hit, 18 months into the program.

We’ll see where we go, my guess is the margins and bet frequency will be lowered to give a higher strike rate, returning a more realistic profit. And of course mr X will need to pick his chosen sport – we’ll see how it goes!

I heard a brilliant analogy years ago about trading, akin to fishing in dangerous waters. I’m reminded of it whenever i see Deadliest Catch, the show about deep sea crab fishing; the rewards are great but stay at sea for too long and you increase the chance of getting caught in a storm.

As always i devote some time to analysing what i do, this is a T20 game from the other week. On the surface it looks like some scalping on the Hampshire market with the larger margin being taken on Kent, not a bad result. Of course these are average odds and stakes, in reality my staking would have been £50-£200 per trade

Thing is, when you get under the hood, it all starts to get a little murky. The automation functioned as it should, i felt the rules I applied matched my reading of the game. What i noticed is the time of my first and last trade.

I think the match began about half 7, in total i was in the market for 2 hours out of the 3 odd it lasted – my bank was exposed to varying levels for just over 66% of the match. It seems like a long time, in reality i know my rules don’t allow exposure above 2% of my bank so it’s possible that my p/l sat in profit for the majority of this time.

In reality, i really don’t know – i could have been at -£181 but it is data that needs evaluating – ideally a graphical export per trade.

I may have landed the fish today but in future I’d like to reduce this time and to monitor the timeline of my P/L during the course of the match.